Besprekingen
Få saker är så accepterade i samhället som kvinnors rädsla. Även de mest högljudda anti-feminister är förstående inför denna rädsla. Många är de som vill följa mig hem, pracka på mig alarm, och lära mig att alltid ha mobilen påslagen i handen.
It’s engagingly written throughout and never gets to heavy even if, like me, you’re not used to reading economics tomes. The feminist slant ends up feeling like common sense rather than a polemic and I can see myself reflecting back on the message in coming weeks and months.
Sexism does plenty of dumb things like that; I liked her discussion of midwives’ use of wooden horns to listen to the fetal heartbeat. Women are associated with wood, not metal; with the rise of doctors, European midwives were banned from even using metal instruments. It was easier to justify higher pay and status for male doctors that way. And yet, as she points out, “[a] task isn’t by definition more demanding simply for requiring the use of tools,” as the process of repositioning a baby in the wrong position for vaginal birth clearly shows. “The ‘feminine’ is equated to the low-paid as a direct result of our refusal to view what a woman does as technical.” Something natural and passed from mother to daughter surely can’t be difficult or innovative and deserving of reward!
When women engage in care of elders or children and do it well without much formal training, “we take that as proof that the jobs are ‘low skilled’ and therefore shouldn’t be well remunerated,” but if a man is “naturally” good at something, that’s often the explanation for why he should be paid well. Authority figures recording or discussing workers often discuss men’s “skills,” but women’s “speed” and “accuracy,” as if they were things that just happened—bodies without minds.
Likewise, she traces failed expectations about robot replacement of workers to gendered ideas about the body. Quoting a roboticist, she notes that “AI researchers long regarded intelligence as the ability to tackle ‘the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging,’” such as chess and math theorems. Those researchers concluded that, if machines could play chess, they could obviously do everything else. But they couldn’t. “[M]any of the jobs robots have the most difficulty with are the very same jobs that we don’t value particularly highly on the labor market”: care work. Mordantly, she speculates that we might be on the cusp of a shift in which these attributes are redefined as male precisely to the extent they are seen as valuable, like the shift in computer programming. “Our grandkids will be taught that ‘emotional intelligence,’ ‘intuition,’ and ‘caring instincts’ have always been inherent to human nature, at least since Jesus washed the feet of his disciples ….”
At the same time, our high tech is still “assembled largely by female human hands in India and China,” and the devaluation of women’s work can hold back technological developments by keeping women’s work too cheap to bother replacing. “Who will want technology to solve problems that remain invisible, since they are currently being taken care of by women for free?” The book is great at emphasizing that these are choices; that government force is behind them; and that we can choose differently.
Amusing/heartbreaking riff near the end: “There is a basic economic assumption in our society that women will perform care work without pay, demands, or gripes, so if nature is a woman, then she obviously has the same duty of care. She must always stand by and care for us, no matter how we behave. Otherwise she is a bad mother: BURN WITCH, BURN! … We want her to be beautiful and vulnerable, and only then are we inclined to protect her.”
Mother of Invention bemoans the all but total lack of respect for women as valid contributors to the economy. Only 3% of venture capital funds go to women. Women are relegated to so-called women’s work, which is paid far cheaper than men’s work. Their inventive and innovative skills are dismissed out of hand. Far worse than merely insulting, it means that humanity misses out on all kinds of leaps forward because only half the populations gets to contribute to growth. The book begins with several intriguing stories to show just how much we might be missing.
Karl Benz’s wife Bertha took the first Benz car on the world’s first long distance trip in 1888. She didn’t tell her husband, but took the kids to visit their grandmother, 56 miles away. With no highways and a car capable of going 10 miles per hour, it took 15 hours to get there. There not being telephones in common use yet, she had no idea her mother was away herself, so they turned around and went home. But along the way, she had to deal with a clogged fuel line, which she cleared with her hatpin, running out of fuel, which she remedied by buying a jar of a chemical mix from a store, using a garter to insulate an ignition wire, and asking a shoemaker to make leather covers for the brakes, which had never experienced such work as going down hills. Not only could she drive, but she knew the car inside out.
Bertha Benz had invested her whole dowry in her husband’s wild automobile dream, and then persuaded her parents to advance her some of her inheritance. The .75 horsepower, three-wheeler worked, and Mercedes-Benz soon became the biggest automobile brand in the world, thanks in no small part to Bertha Benz.
Marçal also spends a lot of time on electric cars, which are now coming back into use. The first versions were relegated to women, because she says, they did not: make the exciting automobile noises, require the strength to crank them into running, or break down and need manly attention to get them going again. Electric cars came with plush seats and glass vases. And roofs, which gasoline and diesel cars only adapted later on. And it’s because of women that we have electric starters on gas cars, after a man tried to help a woman start her car, only to have the crank fly off and hit him in the face. He died of gangrene not long after.
Another story tells how women were finally able to fly alone thanks to the addition of wheels to luggage. The invention of the wheel itself apparently was no eureka moment, but a 5000 year tale of incremental steps –ending with wheels on luggage. The rollator, the wire basket on wheels used by the elderly and disabled to help carry stuff and also to rest on, was invented by a Swedish woman suffering from polio. She couldn’t make herself into the aggressive CEO her invention needed to succeed, and ended up selling it to a local manufacturer for a pittance.
There’s a wonderful story about an army of master seamstresses sewing together the 4000 pieces of early astronauts’ spacesuits, and all the trouble NASA had with them because they weren’t engineers or bureaucrats. They did not fill out the forms, report the progress or prove the spaceworthiness of their work. But there was no question they had the best design, the best materials and the best workmanship of all the firms wanting the contract. Their company was Playtex, which had women front and center from the beginning.
The biggest reason they had the jump on everyone else was latex. Decades earlier, latex began to appear in women’s corsets and bras, giving them flexibility they had never known before. This same flexibility was key to astronauts being able to bend and maneuver, and differentiated the company’s bid for spacesuits from all the others. The fact that a bra maker beat out all the macho engineering firms was not a proud moment, apparently, because women’s underwear was hardly manly space-age stuff.
Marçal puts it in her terms: “ILC (International Latex Corporation) understood that the bra was a piece of engineering, just as they understood that their latex patent could allow astronauts to move on other celestial bodies—in addition to streamlining a woman’s waist. They understood that sewing was a technology, and that soft things can perform hard functions.
“Above all, they managed to build an organization that reflected this.
“And that is why they could innovate. And that’s what took us to the moon.”
There’s also the story of Paulette Grégoire, who took Teflon and used it in a pan - in 1954. The company her husband built out of that concept was and is called Tefal.
The point is, given the chance, women have contributed mightily. Imagine if they were treated as equals.
From these stories, Marçal eases into inequality and all its ugly aspects. Her command of this feminist realm is total and comfortable. She can be sarcastic and damning, or firm-minded and evenhanded, as required. It is a pleasure to read her confident and self-assured take on everything: “In 2019, just over one percent of Swedish venture capital was invested into companies founded by women. The choice of the word ‘skewed’ here is in itself interesting: We’re talking about money in more than ninety-eight percent of cases going to men. But fine, let’s call it ‘skewed.’” And “The problem isn’t that the men have snatched all the high-paid jobs: The problem is that certain jobs are high paid because they are filled by men.”
She then presents her analysis of how women got to be paid so much less than men. Women’s work was considered having to do with the body, which required no salable skills, as everyone could and did do it. So cleaning, childcare, elder care, housework and salons were cheap women’s work. “The body reminds us of all those things we find uncomfortable: our vulnerability and our reliance on others. The very things that we have been taught to see as ‘female.’ After all, this is what the patriarchy has always been about—taking the parts of the human experience that scare us, labeling them as female, and marginalizing them,” she says. Art was produced by men; women made craftwork. Wizards were employed by kings. Witches were burned at the stake.
Men’s work required education, experience and skills that women’s work did not. Employers took terrific advantage of this attitude by breaking jobs down to tiny increments and underpaying women to perform them. This is the system the world still operates under today. “Human exploitation isn’t anything particularly new. It’s basically the oldest business model in the world,” she says.
Worse perhaps, is the whaling model she says rules capital. In the 1800s, when whale oil ran everything that was important to commerce, whaling expeditions were risky, dangerous and a terrible gamble. Innovative capitalists invented a new way to fund them. They packaged multiple whaling expeditions, figuring if just one out three made it back with a shipload of blubber, the profits would be more than enough to compensate for the total loss on the others (Marçal takes readers on a typical expedition to show how it all came together – and fell apart). This model has come down to us as venture capital, enabling billions to be made by a few hundred people in the world, who understand they will lose on most of their investments, but score so highly on one or two it doesn’t matter about the rest.
This kind of aggressive investment also requires the recipients to be world-beating, aggressive, single-minded and fearless themselves. No holds barred, go for the monopoly ahead of all else, and never be afraid of offending. To Marçal, this is all but a pure prescription for males, or what we have driven them to be, and the numbers have shown it all along. Only women who can prove more manly than men need apply.
I particularly liked her analysis of where “innovation” is taking us now. Marçal says we are not employing innovation to make things better for humans; we are forcing humans to adapt to innovation. She says 9-5 weekdays is not a natural or even beneficial state of affairs. Work should be adapted to the desires and requirements of humans. The book was written before the lockdowns eased, but we can see the same thoughts expressed by what amounts to a general strike by low-pay workers. They are refusing to go back to work under the pre-pandemic rates and conditions. US President Joe Biden has his own solution: “Pay them more,” but it clearly goes far deeper than that. Marçal’s take is more detailed: people want freedom from exploitation, like they see in the ultra-rich. They want respect for their lives. Keep your nights and weekends, one half of minimum wage waiter’s job. No thanks.
She sees the new economy dividing into new segments: the ultra-rich, the people who service them, and the rest. And it’s so-called women’s work that will succeed. It’s the life coaches, caregivers, social workers and yoga instructors who will continue to be gainfully employed in the post pandemic, AI era. The truck drivers, machinists, warehouse workers and delivery guys are the ones at risk.
How will men handle this reversal? She spends a great deal of time on Friedrich Engels and his discovery of exactly the same situation in mid 1800s, during the first industrial revolution. Brand new factory jobs went to lower-paid women, and skilled men fell into unemployment. From that, men learned to take over, become far more aggressive and ruthless in business, and push women back into running the home and family. It was good for 150 years, but now artificial intelligence, robotics and automation are again putting men out of work. Or, as Marçal puts it, “Serena Williams beats Gary Kasparov.”
The evidence she presents shows we have always favored new tech. It colors our language and approaches differently from era to era, whether it’s in religion or business or relationships. We now speak of our brains as computers, needing to reboot and so on. We used to speak in farming terms, then in factory terms, and for the moment, high tech.) And that’s wrong, she says. We need to build an economy based on what is real – women giving birth not just to future generations, but to all the new developments we achieve along the way.
“We aren’t used to appreciating how important feelings, relationships, empathy, and human contact are to the economy. Or how central these things are to humanity as a whole. We are used to thinking of them as some sort of cherry on top—the frills that everything else may eventually lead to, as opposed to perhaps the most fundamental social infrastructure of all. Which is precisely what it is. This is what the robots may come to show us, and with this the new technology actually has the potential to make us more human, not less. “
The book, as you can see, is both varied and focused, entertaining and profound. All kinds of great stories are available to make Marçal’s feminist points. She’s not angry or embittered; she seeks to make her stances irrefutable and her outlook positive. This is a different kind of feminist writing, one that earns the reader’s respect and then even gratitude. Because the way she puts things, it’s a terrible loss to all of humanity that women don’t count.
David Wineberg
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DavidWineberg | 3 andere besprekingen | Aug 5, 2021 |
DavidWineberg | 3 andere besprekingen | Aug 5, 2021 | This book started off fairly promisingly with a discussion of early economists, the economic man, and why economists love Robinson Crusoe. After a while, though, I found it to get repetitive. Yes, the reasoning surrounding economics and the economic man is circular, but for several chapters we didn't seem to go anywhere and then tiny things were added on like pointing out that all of economic man's traits were traditionally masculine traits and so women were naturally excluded.
The book did have some good points but I'm not sure I got all that much out of it in the end. Your mileage may vary.
I was also reading this while fuzzy-headed and sick (yes, I've progressed to that stage of sickness where reading is possible but a nap if I could manage it might be better for me), so that may have coloured my reading experience.
The GDP doesn't include unpaid women's labor - childcare, housekeeping, cooking for the family. Feminism's economic progress has been calculated in terms of how many women take paid jobs, but has ignored the fact that this means that their unpaid labor still needs doing, and that this represents a massive shift in the way our economy functions (or, too often, doesn't).
The prose in this book is written in crisp, short sentences in short paragraphs, which, combined with the subject matter, gives the impression of a cold, sarcastic rage. Marçal is engaged in the process of tearing down one of the pillars of society, and she's doing it with a vengeance. I wish I had faith that she would succeed.
Marçal writes in a very fast style. Her paragraphs seem very often single sentences, which quickens the pace. It doesn’t stop her from beating a point to death, but it makes reading the book a breeze. Economics can be so absurd she only has to report on it and it comes across as sarcastic and satirical. It usually doesn’t even require a comment from her. But the book is an endless stream of such nonsense – that we actually operate by. Our governments make faulty decisions based on faulty statistics plugged into faulty models.
The core argument is that housework should count. Canada once calculated women’s work – maintenance, childcare, cooking – to be worth between 30 and 45% of GDP. But GDP includes none of it. This is hardly the only problem with GDP, an unrealistic and artificial fabrication, and ignoring the value contributed by women is an age-old festering sore that Marçal picks at gleefully.
There are so very many reasons why economics is wrong. This is a major one, but there are more important missing components, like natural resources. Raw materials are not part of any standard economic model. We assume they are always available. Free. Free to consume and free to waste and free to pollute. This is the biggest reason the planet is wheezing and groaning – because economists decided homo economicus was no longer part of the ecosystem. He was above it and could exploit as he pleased without accounting or consequence. Marçal finally gets to this point at the very end, giving it one page.
Marçal’s neutral, positive solution: “Economic science should be about how one turns a social vision into a modern economic system.” If only.
David Wineberg
However, having made this observation, the book repetitively meanders, approaching it from various angles but never really following it through to any strong conclusions, and never really addressing it with any rigorous attention to the numbers.
The pros, cons and consequences of wages for all the kinds of work that are currently unpaid are never really explored in this book. Certainly not to the extent of the radical feminists of the 70s who made this same observation and followed with a load of demands for wages for housework, wages for childcare or transhumanist revolution of reproductive work.
Likewise, the economic consequences of women giving up all their unpaid caring work are not really explored. Would the economy collapse if women all simply refused to raise the next generation unless they were paid for it? Or would it thrive from a massive influx of women, suddenly free to focus on careers the way married men can? There are some frightening or exhilarating futures possible here, but they're hardly even mentioned.
The general gist of the argument seems to be: 'Women do a lot of necessary but unpaid work. That's a bit unfair, isn't it?'
Or perhaps: 'Men may refuse to do anything without immediate personal gain, but women aren't so selfish.'
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